Enterprise IS Engineering: The MERODE approach

MERODE is an object-oriented domain modelling method developed at KU Leuven. It's a method for requirements engineering that helps to install an Enterprise Architecture vision and follows a model-driven engineering approach.

The book "Enterprise Information Systems Engineering: The MERODE approach" describes the method. The bookis available from Springer. KULeuven Students can order a personal copy at a discount price via KU Leuven's subscription to Springer (Use the EZ-proxy if accessing from outside the KU Leuven network).

As bridging the gap between demand and supply is a prime goal the approach builds on two main principles that, next to being of benefit to the demand side, benefit to the supply-side as well: MERODE follows a layered system architecture both for requirements and system architecture and it has a strong focus on the quality assurance of models in order to ensure that they can be transformed to code.

The UML is a language and therefore only offers a notation. MERODE is a method: it therefore offers methodological advice on how to build models and how to check their quality, something that is absent in the UML guidelines. MERODE is thus complementary to the UML. MERODE has a companion CASE-tool that offers intelligent support for the quality control of models and enables the automatic generation of a working prototype.

The principles behind the "Business Event" concept of MERODE can also be used to coordinate web services or integrate existing applications.This architectural principle is called 'business event-based coordination (BECO)